Starting Points: Microsoft

Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts

Jun 19, 2010

Soluto Offers a Program to Fix Those Irritating PC Delays

Louiz Green

Soluto, based in Tel Aviv, aims to minimize computer slowdowns with new software. From left are its officers Roee Adler, Ishay Green and Tomer Dvir.

By ANNE EISENBERG

FORGET about desperate housewives. To witness true frustration, watch desperate PC users trying to type, send e-mail or work on a spreadsheet, only to be delayed by those pesky hourglass icons for seconds or even minutes until their computers finally respond.

Image via CrunchBase

Now Soluto, a company based in Tel Aviv, aims to help these PC owners with an unusual program intended to minimize irritating slowdowns. The software runs in the background on PCs, collecting data on delays in program responses and sending the information to company servers for analysis, said Tomer Dvir, a co-founder and the chief executive.

As its first service, the company is offering a free program intended to solve a classic computer problem: a slow boot or start-up time. (The program is at the company’s Web site, www.soluto.com.)

Roee Adler, the chief product officer, said the program analyzed the boot-up process, recording how long it took and suggesting ways to trim the time. “Often you can cut your boot in half, or even more,” he said.

I tried the Soluto program, and by following its recommendations, cut my boot time to 1.44 minutes from 2.40 minutes. I removed some applications from the boot sequence, letting them run after the boot was over. I “paused” other applications that I don’t use on a daily basis — for instance, an application that automatically updates Google products. Instead, I’ll wait until the company lets me know when there is an update. (Soluto divides the possible changes in the boot into “no brainers,” “potentially removable apps” and “required, cannot be removed.”)

The company is also working on solutions to other slowdowns, like interruptions while working on Excel or typing in Word when another application suddenly commands Windows resources, causing a timeout. Finding the source of delays is often tricky, Mr. Adler said, because Windows runs on many different computer models; each has its own complement of downloads and devices, all jockeying for attention.

To find the source of each slowdown, Soluto uses a statistical approach, Mr. Dvir said. “Over millions of machines and millions of users, the problems start to repeat themselves,” he said. “There may be 10,000 people with the identical problem, and one of them will find a solution.”

Those millions of users are still in the future, as are their solutions to Windows problems. To acquire those users, Soluto plans to offer free versions of all its products, Mr. Adler said. As it runs on users’ machines, the program will analyze problems and publish solutions. The program won’t reach in and fix the problem directly; the user will have to do that. But if the initial program for boot optimization is any guide, Soluto will be offering suggestions for fixes, letting users know what others have chosen. A premium version that fixes problems automatically will be available for a charge, he said.

Soluto’s approach to PC frustration is novel and highly promising, said Robert Scoble, a video blogger and a former Microsoft employee. “This is innovation at a deep level; they are bringing in the crowd to augment solutions to Windows problems,” Mr. Scoble said.

If Soluto realizes its plans, he said, large companies will be likely to pay for its services. “If each employee saves a few minutes on each machine,” he said, “the hours saved will be worth a fee.”

Soluto also plans to publish lists of machines and software configurations that cause PC problems. That, too, he said, would be worth paying for.

The company has raised $7.8 million in two rounds of financing, Mr. Adler said. Large investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Giza Venture Capital.

Once the initial, boot-optimization program is in full swing — it is now in a beta or test phase — the company will move on to the next slowdown problem on the agenda — for example, delays in using spreadsheets — Mr. Dvir said.

Soluto, he said, does not require users to register, or provide an e-mail address or any demographic information, he said. “All the information is gathered anonymously,” he said.

SO far, the company is doing an intriguing job, said Ed Bott, author of many books about Windows. “The need they’ve identified among users really resonates with me,” he said. “They have a long-range plan to address many issues of frustration. It’s an original and promising approach.”

The program now has a limited user base, he said. “But the more people who use it, the more valuable it will become,” he said, both to them and to the company.

Many other services, including, for example, PC Pitstop, are already on the market to optimize boot-ups and other processes. The PC Pitstop scan is free, said Dave Methvin, the chief technology officer, “and will tell you what it thinks needs to be done.”

“If you decide you want us to do the work,” and fix problems automatically, he said, “you purchase the product,” either for optimization (Optimize, $29.99) or a complete tune-up (PC Matic, $49.99).

Typically, delays on PCs occur because applications like vendor updates are battling for resources. “When you have 10 of those running in the background,” said Mr. Adler at Soluto, “they add up.”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

Apr 12, 2010

Tensions Rise for Twitter and Outside App Developers - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBase

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Twitter made it easy for programmers outside the company to build 70,000 applications that made the microblogging service more usable. Without them, people would not be able to post a photo, shorten a URL, monitor several Twitter accounts at once, easily use the service from a cellphone or search for people to follow.

Because of that, Twitter grew so fast that no me-too company could mount a serious challenge. People now write 50 million Twitter posts a day, up from just 2.5 million at the beginning of last year and 5,000 in 2007.

The outside developers did it all at no charge because Twitter allowed them to make money from advertisers or Twitter users willing to pay for apps. These programmers — who will gather this week in San Francisco at Chirp, Twitter’s inaugural developer conference — are starting to feel that life is getting a little more complicated.

Serious tension was starting to develop long before the conference, where Twitter is expected to announce ways it will make money, which could include advertising or paid accounts for businesses.

Developers fear that if Twitter’s engineers build the same features that they have, Twitter could transform overnight from generous benefactor to arch competitor to their start-ups.

The tension is becoming more acute as Twitter matures and develops the resources and desire to buy or build its own version of some of the outside apps. On Friday, Twitter announced that it had acquired Atebits, which makes Tweetie for the iPhone and Mac, and that it had worked with Research In Motion to build an official BlackBerry app. That has other start-ups that make mobile Twitter apps wondering if there is any room left for them.

“When we launched, Twitter was incomplete, so developers rushed to fill those holes, but eventually we’re going to have to build a lot of features in because they should be there,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a recent interview. “We want to set those expectations.”

Fred Wilson, the Union Square Ventures partner who invested in Twitter and serves as a director, echoed that sentiment in a blog post last week that immediately put many developers on edge. “I think the time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone,” he wrote. “Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.”

Pete Karl is an engineer who builds Twitter apps at the Digital Influence Group and his own start-up called Lion Burger. “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said. “Before, I think developers had the upper hand. But now it’s time for Twitter to try and make some money, and I think they want to create a situation where the scales are tipped more in Twitter’s favor.”

For the technology industry, this is a familiar story. Giving away technical secrets to those who want to use your product to build their own might seem counterintuitive to most companies, but it is a common path to success in the tech world. Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook have all, to varying degrees, opened their platforms this way.

It can be a stunning source of growth.

“Embracing the openness leads to ubiquity, and if you can embrace that ubiquity, you can make money,” said Mark C. Stevens, a lawyer for start-up companies at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.

But invariably, the provider and the developers bump against each other. “That’s how it always is when you develop for a corporate-owned platform,” Dave Winer, software developer, blogger and visiting scholar at New York University, wrote last week. “You have to make peace with that reality before you write your first line of code.”

Microsoft, for example, became ubiquitous in large part because of all the tools, like memory managers, that outside developers built. Once Microsoft built memory managers into Windows, those start-ups became irrelevant.

Twitter has been unusually free about letting developers tap into its data and technology, through what is known as an application programming interface. Sometimes it gives developers certain tools, like geolocation for Twitter posts, before it uses them on its own site, and developers can use the data and create a site or app without signing any contracts or even alerting Twitter.

“The problems we’re solving are so big that we need a lot of people working on them and we need to give them the same level of access,” said Ryan Sarver, the director of platform at Twitter.

If developers build something Twitter wants, the company has three options — let it exist separately, create its own version, or buy the start-up, as Twitter did in 2008 with Summize, which created a Twitter search engine, and last week with Atebits.

“For every platform ever, it’s a question of what should be left up to the ecosystem and what should be created on the platform,” Mr. Williams said.

Developers are rapidly learning that truth. Heypic.me is an iPhone app for posting photos to Twitter and to a Web site that shows Twitter photos on a map of the world.

Twitter has been extremely open with its data, said Heypic.me’s developers, Andrew Seigner and Robert Manson. When the developers asked for more geolocation data, Twitter promptly gave it to them. But they are aware of the risks. “When you go to write a Twitter application, you almost wonder, is Twitter going to come out with the same feature in a month and blow me away?” Mr. Seigner said.

Their fears were realized when Twitter built a similar site for the South by Southwest conference. They sent Mr. Williams a Twitter message asking if the site foreshadowed future Twitter sites. “If so, you have put us out of business,” they wrote. Mr. Williams responded that it was a one-off site.

As with all relationships, the tension could worsen once money is involved. That is a concern for companies like CoTweet, a San Francisco start-up that offers tools for businesses to manage their Twitter accounts by tracking conversations with customers and letting multiple employees respond.

Companies like Ford and Coca-Cola pay for the service. But Twitter has said it will introduce paid accounts for businesses, including a tool for multi-author accounts that was inspired by CoTweet’s. (CoTweet was acquired last month by the e-mail marketing firm ExactTarget.)

Both Mr. Williams and Aaron Gotwalt, co-founder of CoTweet, said they were confident that companies would pay for both services, because they would also offer different things.

Twitter has given some hints about where developers will have the most luck. Mr. Williams says Twitter has “a very complementary relationship” with start-ups like CoTweet that build apps for specific audiences. The need to discover people on Twitter and to search for the most relevant posts is so big that many people will be able to do it, Mr. Sarver said.

Mr. Wilson, who said he was not speaking on behalf of Twitter, said that big businesses would also grow from social games on Twitter and sites that group posts about a certain topic, like movies or job listings.

One of the goals of the Chirp conference is to shepherd developers in the direction that will be most useful to them — and to Twitter.

“There are things that are not good opportunities that people will probably be disappointed if they invest in,” Mr. Williams said. “But we also think there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that we’re not interested in doing or have no plans to do.”

Mar 7, 2010

Facebook Is Getting Older Without Getting Old

Image via Wikipedia

By RANDALL STROSS

FACEBOOK now has more than 400 million active users, up from only 50 million as recently as 2007. If social networking still resembled a young, hip downtown nightclub scene — one day a site is hot, the next it’s not — we might expect the crowds to decamp soon. Facebook would become another Friendster, still around but ghostly, forgotten by most.

Facebook, however, isn’t likely to have such a fate. For one thing, it has attracted many “olds,” and they tend to stay put. (Consider AOL.) More than 50 percent of Facebook’s members in the United States are 35 or older, and only 26.8 percent are 24 or under, according to an analysis of December visitors by comScore Media Metrix.

More than demographic stability favors Facebook. The site has shrewdly emulated the “network effects” strategy used by another brand that has long held a dominant position in the computer industry: Microsoft Windows.

Economists use the term network effects to refer to the way the value of a product or service increases in tandem with the number of people who use it. If you’re one of only 10 people in the world with an e-mail account, its usefulness is limited; add a billion more, and the practical value of yours increases apace.

A Facebook member enjoys immediate benefits when each friend joins — these are direct network effects. But the average user already has 130 friends, so unless the user is unusually gregarious, the direct effects won’t increase drastically beyond a certain point.

For an individual member, the most powerful network effects may be indirect ones that come from the huge number of unknown other people in the Facebook world. Their mass attracts, in turn, suppliers of complementary products and services.

For Windows, the enormous installed base attracted third-party software developers, which in turn drew more users. Apple’s iPhone has had a similar virtuous cycle. So, too, on Facebook, developers of applications like FamilyLink, Marketplace and iLike’s Music create a software universe with seemingly infinite choices. And that attracts more users — and still more developers.

Facebook’s decision to open its site to outside developers in May 2007 was a “transformative moment,” said Charlene Li,founder of the Altimeter Group, a strategy consulting firm.

“Because Facebook allows developers on their site, the people who would have developed the next social networking site are now working with Facebook,” she said.

Nick O’Neill, founder of AllFacebook.com, a site with Facebook-related news and statistics, said, “Games are the killer app for Facebook.” Because of their social nature, popular Facebook games produce direct network effects. The dedicated farmers of the FarmVille game — it attracts 83 million users a month — nudge friends to play and become virtual neighbors, enhancing their own game experience. (That pull gives Facebook an advantage Windows lacked; its signature game was Solitaire.)

Businesses, nonprofits, government offices and celebrities use Facebook pages to disseminate information, thus forming an ever-growing simulacrum of the Web within Facebook’s walls. Network effects are at work here, too: users attract well-known names, which, in turn, draw more users to Facebook.

The White House, for example, has its own Facebook page, one of three million active pages that have an aggregate of 5.3 billion fans, the company says.

Facebook members in the United States, on average, spent more than seven hours on the site in January, according to the Nielsen Company. That is more than three times the average time spent on Google’s Web sites. Facebook’s average number of minutes per visitor grew almost 10 percent from the previous month, while the average at sites for every other company in the top 10 fell — Google, by 14.3 percent; Yahoo, 27 percent; and Microsoft, 26.9 percent.

Google does not reap the benefits of significant network effects because its search algorithms are centered on the analysis of links, and operate essentially the same way whether one person or six billion are using it. Google has tried to add new services as quickly as it can — or more quickly than it is ready to, as shown by the less-than-smooth introduction last month of Buzz, which gives Gmail some social network features.

Network effects, if powerful enough, can push a platform past the tipping point, accelerating its growth. “As the Windows example shows, once a market with network effects tips to one dominant platform, then it is very hard to tip back,” said Andrei Hagiu, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.

But network effects alone don’t necessarily produce tipping, he cautioned. Users must also perceive a high switching cost —in this case, in time and inconvenience — if they were to move to another social networking site.

Facebook increasingly makes it easy for its members to remain loyal. Outside sites can become Facebook Connect partners, offering visitors the ability to log on with their Facebook username and continue to interact with their Facebook friends even when they aren’t at the Facebook site. More than 60 million Facebook members use Facebook Connect each month, the company says.

YET Facebook Connect introduces a strategic risk for the company. As its adoption spreads, Facebook members may spend less time at the home site, with possibly negative implications for Facebook’s business model. The company says that more than half its users now log on to Facebook daily. But that share might drop significantly as more outside sites incorporate Facebook Connect.

“It could turn out that taking your network with you is more powerful than having all of the activity around your network happening in a central place,” said Noah Brier, head of strategic planning at the Barbarian Group, a digital marketing firm.

Industry watchers constantly scan the horizon for a challenger that could displace Facebook, and Mr. Brier thinks he has a sighting: “Who will be the next Facebook?” he asks. “Facebook Connect.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Jul 30, 2009

Fast Forward: Yahoo to the Recycle Bin

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Adieu, Yahoo.

Not the Web site or the company, but the search engine. Yahoo announced Wednesday morning that it signed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to combine search and advertising efforts, each ceding much of one field to the other.

"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," a press release declared.

Few Web users are likely to miss Microsoft's contribution to Web searching, but most people have fed a query to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo at some point. Replacing Yahoo's search engine with Microsoft's Bing would delete one of the oldest landmarks in the Web landscape.

It would also take away a choice for users and a source of innovation for Web search, contrary to the claims at the "Choice. Value. Innovation." site that the companies set up to herald the news.

Yet their separate attempts have not slowed Google's steady growth. Yahoo may have no other choice but to make its search engine yet another casualty of outsourcing.

If so, it will mark the end of an long run.

Yahoo began life in February 1994 as a simple catalogue of Web sites put together by Stanford University students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It acquired its name -- short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" -- not long after and then expanded into a true search engine.

That head start, combined with Yahoo's early proficiency and the missteps of other Web sites (anybody remember Lycos, Excite or HotBot?), allowed the firm to become the Microsoft of search engines for quite a few years.

And then yet another Stanford research project took off. Google found things on the Web faster and more accurately than Yahoo and didn't try to sell you 20 unrelated things as it did. Then Google began adding other Web services -- e-mail, maps, calendars -- that made Yahoo's fare look clumsy by comparison.

In the process, Google ran away with much of the Web advertising business -- a machine that generates most of its profits.

Inertia has helped Yahoo hold on to a respectable chunk of the market even as its search site grew stagnant and new ventures including a music store and a social network flopped. Almost 20 percent of U.S. Web searches ran through its site last month, according to ComScore's data. Yahoo has also kept a spot in many browser toolbars; for example, it remains the only search-shortcut alternative to Google on the iPhone.

Microsoft, for its part, spent years fumbling around with quasi-proprietary online services such as MSN or Windows Live. Two winters ago, it tried to solve its Internet issues by proposing to buy Yahoo for around $47.5 billion.

The Microsoft folks in Redmond, Wash., should thank their counterparts in Sunnyvale for spurning that offer, against the advice of nearly everybody in the technology business. Yahoo's rejection stopped Microsoft from burning through billions of dollars just in time for the economy to plunge off a cliff, then spending years cleaning up after an AOL/Time Warner-esque collision of corporate cultures.

Left on its own, Microsoft had to build a better search site, and with Bing it may have done just that. The site, unlike some of Microsoft's older forays and Yahoo's just-redesigned home page, delivers much of the accuracy and simplicity of Google.

Should the Yahoo-Microsoft deal survive antitrust scrutiny, Yahoo's search technology won't vanish down the bit bucket; Microsoft would be able to add its features to Bing. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to handle automatically placed search ads. And other Web services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, will remain separate -- your Yahoo Mail won't get forwarded to Hotmail or vice versa.

Filo and Yang surely didn't mean for their invention to land in Microsoft's parts bin. But if the alternative is the continued surrender of Web search and advertising to Google -- a competition in which Yahoo has done little to distinguish itself lately -- the company they founded hasn't left itself many other options.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com. Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.